"When you buy a Raspberry Pi, the $35 computer doesn't come with an operating system. Loading your operating system of choice onto an SD card and then booting the Pi turns out to be pretty easy. But where do Pi-compatible operating systems come from? With the Raspberry Pi having just turned one year old, we decided to find out how Raspbian - the officially recommended Pi operating system - came into being. The project required 60-hour work weeks, a home-built cluster of ARM computers, and the rebuilding of 19,000 Linux software packages. And it was all accomplished by two volunteers."

Reading the article, it's seems pretty clear to me he did a lot of reinventing well beyond the floating point unit. It looks like he had a lot of fun building his ARM cluster and converting packages the way he did, but he could have avoided a great deal of work by cross compiling the packages in a more conventional way.